Gambo

It is clearly in for an especially-extended chart run, even by today's streaming-saturated standards, and despite the joint threats of the primary artist cap potentially pushing the song out of the official published version of our chart should three more be consumed more in any week, and ACR artificially halving its streaming value and thereby forcing it downwards in position, it has an excellent chance of seeing it through. I do doubt whether it can survive the week or two over Christmas this year still within the Top 40 echelon, but remain more confident that the title will cling on to a Top 75 and even more likely Top 100 berth across those challenging weeks. At the very least, 'Rein Me In' - and 'Man I Need' - will both almost certainly still be streamed sufficiently to maintain a constant presence on the combined Top 200 tracks chart - i.e. the 'real' one we don't get to see that is free from any manipulations to render the rankings more convenient for the industry to present - through Christmas and well-beyond, possibly even into Xmas 2027!!

For all the interesting ideas and diverse debate, it seems we're no closer to a consensus on how best a singular, national, official, catch-all single tracks chart should operate. Perhaps there simply isn't a sufficiently detailed, fair, even and honest way of compiling such weekly rankings nowadays, what with the multiple methods of accessing and appreciating music (not to mention many other competing forms of personal entertainment in the real and virtual worlds). The singles chart 'of old' - say in the sales-only era, wasn't perfect; any 'chartologist' will attest to that, whether it be limitations of compilation, methodology, arbitrary imposition at various times of rules, the need to suit the sponsoring industry bodies first before the consumer, and so forth. But at least it was simple enough - count up what seem to be genuine paid-for purchases of available product and rank them. Okay it was never quite that straightforward, what with verification, anti-hype mechanisms etc, but you know what I mean - whether it be manual or automated data, physical or digital, processed using fast-paced IT - it was a basic totting-up. Granted, sales were only ever one means of measuring popularity of product, even in the less-diverse, pre-digital era. But it was as good a measure as any, and people broadly understood it, whether or not they were aware of the glitches, difficulties, faults and unevenness of the resultant weekly countdown. Yet with streaming blended into sales - two entirely distinct modes of music consumption - it immediately presented the compilers (Kantar) and custodians (OCC) with complex problems, some of which only really became truly apparent as the sector matured a few years in, and inevitably, compromises were made that skewed what had been, for a decade or so, a pretty clean-cut genuine weekly tabulation of what was not so much best-selling, but most-streamed, or - overall - 'most-consumed' titles across seven days. It would've been easier had streaming just become the main means of consumption to the extent that sales no longer happened, or were so minimal as to be statistically irrelevant and so not worth counting any longer. While streaming has cannibalised much of the old single-track sales market, it's not done so to that degree where sales can just be ignored. So the two have to co-exist as meaningful measures of a song's popularity. And what of any other popularity measures, which some argue should be thrown into an ever-complexifying mix? It's perhaps fortunate for the industry that it's mostly only their problem - if they see one at all - and that fewer consumers of musical product care about the official weekly charts than ever before. We operate in a bit of a bubble here where we all still really care! Yet most stay ignorant and happily so because their interest in charts has waned to zero, or passing casual observation - partly due to the maturity of popular music as a format but also thanks to those same charts becoming over-complicated due to the need to respond to changes in the consumption market. A bit of chicken-and-egg really. So, things like the streaming issue above may never actually be addressed, any more than the inequities and inadequacies of the current Top 100 will be. Some say the answer is getting access, or even full reversion, to the 'real' Top 200 combined rankings. It's true, those are accurate and honest. But many on this thread ideally want more movement and more diversity, more turnover and more access for new acts/songs in a chart. What little reportage about the actual, true Top 200 tracks shows us is that it's even more stagnant and stale than the manipulated 100, as streaming encompasses so many millions of titles across all genres, and all types/ages of consumer are latching on and streaming anything, but often the same 'classic' songs, ad-infinitum, going way beyond the limited compositional choices of the modern era. And so the singles chart reflects that, as it stands. Yes, OCC must keep compiling a real ranking, even if it is never made public as it'd shine the spotlight on the artificial aspects of their official version which they want to pass off as pre-eminent and being of historical record. But converting back to that as the official listings isn't now a solution, if it ever was, to the problems confronted here. All that being said, I just keep looking, with my thinking cap on, at the spread of charts currently produced by OCC, and wonder whether there is any way they could, in time, champion some sort of 'new releases' type tabulation. It wouldn't be the 'real' or even 'main' chart, as it would exclude certain titles and perhaps encourage others, depending on its qualification criteria (a debate to be had in itself). This seems to me to be somewhat preferable to trying to upgrade any of the genre-specific charts, which all harbour similar issues to the main one anyway, and operate differently depending on how well a genre or kind of artist performs in the different sectors that make up the combined consumption tally. The problem wouldn't be how to set such a chart up, compiling it or presenting it - rather, it would be how to give it sufficient profile as to rival, if not ultimately supersede, the main chart in the minds of both industry bods and regular consumers. And whether that could ever be countenanced by those paying for it? The main chart would always be there as a barometer of the overall market's performance each week and through time. But I think seeking to fiddle with that is a fool's errand, and perhaps the best way forward is to gradually downgrade it in favour of a tabulation that exists specifically to measure and chart the performance of newer material, or - if it were felt important - also genuinely-resurgent older content. I guess this is a tall order as the OCC have never favoured 'rival' charts (part of the reason they ended up having to present a combined chart in the first place was because having two separate streams and sales listings was seen as confusing and wouldn't serve the perceived need for a 'single source of truth' for posterity's sake - even if that source is slightly skewed from reality to suit industry preference and convenience!). And inevitably there'd be keen debate about the exact rules for such a chart, exclusions and so on. Yet I'd suggest that these may be less irksome than now, as we'd be dealing not with the 'main' singles chart, but a special 'sub' chart focused on current happenings. It wouldn't pretend to be 'complete' and cover everything, so maybe it'd matter less if certain rules and regs were applied to it, in order to keep it fresh and functioning in the way it should? In the end, they could abandon the faked Top 100 altogether, just keeping the honest 200 as a background barometer, but with the 'new stuff' tabulation nudged to the foreground in media terms. Don't get me wrong folks; I very-much doubt this would ever really come to pass. But for the purposes of the arguments here, in an ideal universe, I reckon we need to move beyond the 'main' chart as it stands and start building towards a separate, more focused, if in effect narrower and more regulated, ranking to give weekly relative indications as to which recent (or recently-reignited) titles are leading the pack, and as it gains profile, so would the music qualifying to feature within it, even albeit on far-fewer total listens or buys than some of the stuff in the main table. While the main list would always exist, it'd be this new countdown that could create much more excitement, even though it would of course never recreate the buzz around the charts per se that existed in the latter half of the 20th century - sadly, that boat has long-since sailed.

I used to be astonished that the OCC apparently didn't have the capacity to determine which streams had been ordered-up on demand and which were just passively listened-to via a pre-conceived playlist put together by the provider. However, it's struck me since that they will only receive data in the way that streaming services are able (and more importantly, willing) to supply to them for chart compilation purposes. I think the bottom line is that most if not all are not prepared to do the sort of granular breakdowns of their data that would be necessary to delineate between the two kinds of listen, and so there's not much the OCC can do about it. Even if it had resources to utilise the sort of tech required to do that kind of drilled-down analysis, if the data is simply only provided to them as a raw figure of how many listens there were over whatever the runtime limit is (is it 30 seconds?), then they can't then analyse it further to try and establish how many were passive and how many were on demand. Another aspect of streaming data reporting that still bewilders me - and which I genuinely can't believe cannot be rectified in today's high-tech, fast-paced world of data - is that the OCC are still having to estimate the streams for a whole day (Thursday)! Even in July 2017 when this car-crash combined chart had its various rules imposed to try and contain the unwanted effects of streaming, that seemed a bit old hat, akin to when BMRB (and initially even Gallup, with all their computing prowess brought to bear) still couldn't collect data comprehensively or quickly enough to compile a Christmas week chart! Yet here we are, nine years on, and apparently Thursday streams are still entirely guessed at thanks to lack of proper data. I'm hardly expert on this area, but as a layman outsider, I can't help but feel this has to be more to do with streaming services' laziness than a lack of technical capacity to compile and provide the actual data for Thursday in time for the new chart to be processed and published the following day. The OCC has many faults, some of which it absolutely could fix itself, and so far totally refuses to bother doing so, even when people from fora like this let them know in no uncertain terms! But some issues with the chart's compilation are I think more to do with the services providing streaming data than the company tasked with marshalling it all.

We also heard the same thing during the fairly rapid transition from physical to digital paid-for sales in the mid-'00s. I recall reading some press suggesting that the download, for all its novelty and appeal to youth, was hardly reinvigorating a generally moribund music market, and that their sales at that stage weren't anything close to what CDs had been at their peak, nor cassettes, nor vinyl. Whilst that might've been a statement of fact, the format did eventually grow to overall annual totals far in excess of what'd been managed over store counters even in the heydays of physical in the late '70s and late '90s; it just took a few more years (until the early '10s) for it to peak (it then staged a rather more precipitous withdrawal from the market as it got cannibalised by streaming instead of course, but that's another story). Moreover, someone made the valid observation (possibly Alan Jones, possibly James Masterton) that with so many more individual tracks available digitally to buy, including increasingly large dollops of catalogue songs, and of course all B-sides and album cuts as well as just true 'singles', it would be inevitable that your average typical music buyer's spend would probably only go so far, and that they might well end up choosing to purchase more older or non-current titles rather than focus all their aural attentions on here-and-now releases. I think the example cited, which was very topical at the time, was Rihanna's 'Umbrella', which managed a still-impressive ten weeks atop the official chart, mostly on digital sales, but it was only shifting maybe 25-35,000 copies each week to do so. The author argued this was still pretty worthy when set against a market of millions of songs to choose from, as opposed to the mere 400-500 or so one might be able to source from stores in the physical era. So while the tallies seemed considerably lower than in the past, one wasn't quite comparing like with like. I'd say it's the same in the streaming era too - with so many possibilities musically across all artists, eras and genres, and with only so much time able to be devoted to digital listening, any single title managing say 40K streaming-equivalent 'sales' units in a week actually looks pretty impactful, given the sheer depth, breadth and width of the competition. Perhaps it isn't really legitimate to expect current chart-toppers achieving their position largely through streams to ever manage too much more than 60 or 70K in a seven-day frame; which in my book definitely makes it a notable achievement when any track manages it - and does so sufficient to remain ahead of all the pack for almost 20 weeks! It's just that that level of attainment can't really be measured fairly alongside the sales-based equivalents of say, the '80s. It's two different types of consumption and we mustn't forget that although they've been spliced together and awkwardly massaged into a single figure to suit official chart compilation purposes, they're actually two different beasts and don't make good bedfellows. As for monoculture, well, hasn't that been the allegation of every generation or decade's music since the dawn of rock?! It isn't entirely without foundation, but it doesn't mean it's a really fair assessment of current trends in music, or a key driver behind how tracks behave in our charts.

What an interesting idea for a thread! It's hard to find any really 'new' ideas on chart fora which haven't already been thought-through, researched in depth and presented elsewhere, but this is genuinely something I've not seen before. A bit too much of a skew towards 21st century material for my preferences. But then obviously certification of every track on an album was only really something that could've become a phenomenon from the download era onwards, when all tracks could be purchased individually irrespective of whether they received an official single release, and only really a regular phenomenon since the streaming era took hold, meaning that most music consumption is now measured on rented digital listens rather than purchases of the product. Hence certification of multiple tracks of all kinds goes up significantly across many more artists' repertoire, and every song on a long-player set has far greater potential to reach for a certification of some sort, in far less time after initial release. Yet I am in full agreement with the earlier post who observed that Catfish and The Bottlemen's LP feels like a bit of an outlier among these other acts, most of whom are megastars and huge hitters in streaming (and in some cases sales too) contexts and who are so well-established and well-known among the populace that even those who don't listen to popular music, or enjoy its recent output, can't not have heard of them (Ed, Taylor, Adele, Justin et al). Yet C & TB are rather more niche by comparison, and they've never even managed a Top 10 hit single! Indeed, with the key exception of Arctic Monkeys, whose certification was as much if not more thanks to digital (and to a fair extent physical) sales across each of its songs, guitar-driven and more old-school 'rock' acts are the ones that seem to have lost out most noticeably in the rapid transition away from paid sales and towards rented streams. I've never quite been able to pin down convincingly why that is. The genre went back to 1960s/'70s basics in the '90s and struck gold again after taking a relative backseat during the '80s, and kept its profile up through the 2000s, yet sometime around the '10s its interest waned to the point of barely being represented in the most-consumed listings. Okay, new rock artists still pop up more pertinently on the albums charts, but often only for a week or so on fanbase sales only. It's a novelty even now to see a rock or guitar-led song in the singles charts, unless it's a 'heritage' title that's receiving special 'TikTok' or 'Netflix' treatment etc. Unlike hip-hop/rap and its subgenres which seem to have proliferated and positively thrived in the streaming era, poor old rock (especially new bands) seems to have been largely overlooked on that metric. And with sales being so low, even good performance in that sector tends not to raise its profile that notably among most listeners. So, to see a C & TB album on this list is even more like a breath of fresh air (and I'm not even that big a rock music lover). I just wouldn't have thought that if there was a recent artist of that ilk to break with the overarching trend and receive major streaming attention, it would've been them!

As these recent regular updates testify, given the slow chart turnover and prospects for certain artists to have titles lodged in the Top Ten for many months largely due to long-term saturation (I suspect often passive) streaming, despite the threat of ACR to artificially remove them from it prematurely, I think this list is set to grow considerably, not just in weeks tallied for artists already beyond the 100 mark, but for new acts to join them, perhaps after relatively short spells of time. If the official chart's shape and character continues long-term without other tricks being introduced to try and manipulate it into something more 'convenient' (but less 'real'), it is perfectly possible that sooner or later someone will eclipse Elvis.

It's an oft-asked question isn't it, both casually in everyday conversations, and more widely in national media, and we're oft-told the same answer: that it can still matter - and definitely does to some, depending on circumstances - but in the main, it matters quite a bit less as to what song or which act is currently at Number 1, on either the singles or albums charts (the latter was of course never as important to pop music followers and chart fans as the former, even in the heyday of the 'pop' format and during the earlier, novel years of there being weekly charts ranking their relative popularity by paid-for sales of recorded product). I would now love to go ahead and blast that conclusion out of the water, or at least carefully and stealthily unstitch it to reveal its inadequacies or lack of reliability. But, as an all-round statement that provides a convenient short answer to the question, I actually think it rather hits the nail on the head. And I think the various responses to it on this thread underline that. If one is very interested in pop music per se, and/or very absorbed by the way it is analysed through charts, and/or really enjoys following whatever is current musically, and/or is actively involved in some capacity in the music industry via performing/producing/writing/promoting/managing etc, then chances are, whatever one felt about the charts in yesteryears gone by, one will have a regard for, and greater knowledge of, what goes on with them today. It's either a labour of love, a professional necessity, or a bit of both. Yet we must remember that for the vast majority, who are (and possibly always were) fairly casual music listeners or chart followers (and typically at a young stage in their lives too, unless they found a career within the business itself later), none of these three predicaments truly apply. In fact, most people are actually just listening fairly passively, taking little notice of the official figures, stats etc, and just enjoy the musical output at their own pace and at their own level - be that more comprehensively or less so. Many suspect that not that much notice is even really being taken of the music played (hence the concept of 'passive streaming')! Besides any artists for whom they have a particular special passion, and for whom they may pay a disproportionate amount of money to enjoy and spend a skewed amount of their time to do so, it's likely to be mostly passive listening via pre-conceived streaming site playlists, or traditional radio, television or internet plays that makes up the average typical person's musical intake. And all the while immersed in a deeply varied, fast-moving, fickle and often shallow mix of competing interests from diverse sources, all distracting from what was once a simpler, smaller set of more universal appeals, of which current pop music and its performance in chart terms was once one - and a big one, at that. Sad though it is for those of us of an age or generation to have actively enjoyed a more chart-centric pop culture through less-flexible but more-straightforward media, it was perhaps always inevitable that popular music, notwithstanding all its potential musical variety and diversity, was heading for a rut, not just given its three-four-minute limited commercial form, but the exhaustion of so many entertainment and artistic possibilities within it in just half a century. No wonder music began to sound somewhat similar, recycled, reinterpreted, revisited or a diluted distillation of something that'd already gone before. It's the way it is - not just an anti-youth or pro-older music instinct. And so it probably follows logically that the charts created to measure it, good or bad, consistent or not, eventually became stale too, and started to reflect more about the clever ways the industry was marketing its artists' products and less about the appeal or novelty of the content itself. This began in the 1980s, and took a hold in earnest in the 1990s. As the gradual development of physical formats eventually gave way to the digital equivalent in the 2000s, and in only one decade moving away from paid purchases altogether (buying) and towards rented listens via the internet (streaming) come the close of the 2010s, this was only going to impact the shape and character of those charts even more, which again probably inevitably began a process of older listeners/followers feeling increasingly distanced from the modern incarnation of the same beast, as well as increasingly nostalgic for the way they perceived it to have been done in times gone by, likely with youthful enthusiasm and naive innocence still on their side. The hard truth is buying and streaming music are two entirely different means of consuming it, yet both arguably are key representations of measuring the popularity of it. Hence an official chart that attempts to cover both, yet naturally falls short in many ways through its ill-conceived and clunky methods of trying to translate rented streams into paid buys, to create the nebulous and poorly-understood 'consumption unit', all predicated on entirely arbitrary conversions. That isn't a formula to encourage anyone towards taking the resultant tabulations seriously, be they young or old, lovers of the music featured or otherwise. Each generation wants to claim something as its own, even if that can no longer strictly-speaking be 'new' or 'original' when set against what's passed before, and whatever that is should be reflected by the corresponding era's charts, but there is no real doubt that gradually, since the turn of the century, fewer pop fans have actively cared about what those rankings were, and the increasingly manipulated and complicated manner in which they come about. The internet ironically allows more people more access to more music and more entertainment generally than ever before, yet this only serves to minimise the average engagement per capita with each separate source or phenomenon, in terms of both depth of interest and time spent. What we've all been given with one hand, perhaps has been taken away to some degree with another. In summary, given the state of popular music after 80 short and explosive years, the way in which it is preferably consumed by the majority, and the competition from external media generally, meant that 'the charts' - or at least the way in which a majority of people viewed or engaged with them - could never have stayed the same as what it was 25+ years since. The interesting observation here is that while some steadfast and stoic older hands are still trying to get their heads around that reality and deal with the inadequacy and incompatability arising from it, a much-larger portion of the population are simply resigned not to notice or care too much, whether that be a gradual, subconscious process, or a sudden, deliberate one. Then again, they're probably not caring too much more about many other competing aspects of popular entertainment either. The music charts are not the only thing to have diminished or lost out in the digitally-driven world.

That might be true. But it's not necessarily the case though - on the singles, cumulative streaming tallies of titles are compiled consistently at the 1:100 notional 'sale to streams' ratio, whereas the weekly official charts are of course compiled using differing ratios, depending on certain conditions (paid or ad-funded, SCR or ACR, etc).

Quite pleased it's Mark Goodier who'll be presenting this. An older-school, articulate, more authoritative delivery is required for such a milestone countdown (whatever the vagaries might be around its compilation methodology, data quality and so on which I daresay will lead to all kinds of debates afterwards!).

I must say, I opened this thread up thinking it would be a walk through all the tracks which should have been number ones in the United Kingdom, if the true weekly rankings for most-consumed songs were used officially instead of the artificially-manipulated positions we get, which sometimes obscure what the actual most popular title is (poor Olivia Dean has suffered this surely more than anyone, with 'Man I Need' being No 1 on the Top 200 combined tracks OCC chart for something like 11 weeks, but only 1 on the Top 100 official one - not that she's too bothered by that just now given her fantastic haul of BRIT awards secured over the weekend!). So a more precise title for this would seem to make sense. Like you though I can't immediately think of something that fits the bill!

^ Particularly when we have an entire era lacking in any sort of reliable weekly sales figures to use in order to make such calculations - and I'm not just referring to the pre-official (February 1969) period during which limited sales reports were converted into points to compile the charts; it wasn't really until as late as April 1997 that we had reliable enough returns of sales from nearly the entire UK market as 'defined universe' units on which to be more certain of which position each title should be at - and sadly to date we don't even have all the weekly tallies for each chart position even in that more accurate era (although admittedly most former No 1 singles' exact sales/consumption totals have been cited in Music Week reports in the week in which they are toppled, alongside the tally for the new No 1, since the late 2000s). Then since July 2017 we have the issue of tracks which were 'actual' or 'true' chart-toppers, but whose position was artificially lowered for the official published weekly chart purposes, thereby to some folks making the figures given for the official No 1 and positions below it somewhat less meaningful... Interesting thread though as you say. What it highlights most keenly to my mind is that if one truly cares about how big songs actually are, one must drill down into the consumption figures - be they weekly or to-date - in order to establish fairer comparisons between titles' performances. Chart positions in themselves tell us a much narrower picture of relative success, and arguably even less nowadays, given not just the artificiality of the official weekly rankings as presented by the OCC, but also the way songs can build up huge consumption tallies through time primarily via streaming-equivalent units, despite sometimes having no obvious weekly chart profile whatsoever.

Thanks KOS. This chart date - coincidentally (and somewhat preposterously) exactly 20 years ago today - was vaguely familiar to me and I couldn't quite recall why; it must've been the last 'missing' chart in the old OCC archives before they got uploaded (seem to recall an enquiry about missing physical singles charts from those weeks over on UKMix a while ago). Not being a computer-literate sort of chap, I admit to only feebly grasping the concept of "a change of export rules" leading to a slight reconfiguration of positions on a few selected charts in their archive. But does this mean in every case where we know the chart has been affected by this process that these apparently-differently (or more recently) exported versions we now see online are the correct ones, and that any earlier iteration can safely be discarded? Apologies if that should be clear above but maybe I'm missing something.

Interesting indeed - fortunately no track appears to have been 'demoted' out of the Top 75 by this apparent re-run. Just a re-configuration of existing positions within the last 36 of that part of the chart. I certainly don't recall any indication that there had been any known errors with the published version, either at the time or since.

Interesting one. Clearly the actual cast members of 'Glee' were the ones performing on their recorded releases, and so in that sense I suppose the answer is 'no', because they were real people singing on records and appearing in associated clips. But why did so many of their tracks sell/stream so well in the first place - if the assembly of vocalists had not branded themselves in such an obvious manner as clearly linked to the production of 'Glee', and their performances 'in character' as it were on the shows which evidently were intended to promote consumption of both the show and records, then would their material have become as popular as it was for a couple of years at the turn of the '00s/'10s? Probably not, so in another sense, it was the fictional element of their performances - the characters they were embracing while performing their particular type of choral covers and medleys of already-familiar numbers - which was key to The Glee Cast's act, which arguably makes them 'fictional' in the context of initial user engagement and commercial appeal. Oh God now this really is getting difficult!

I think it's the varied way in which one could define a term such as 'fictional' in respect of popular music history that makes it a debate worth having on sites like this though! The fact that it can be determined differently by different people - and even then it can be tricky to stay within one's own personal definitions consistently - does make it more complicated, but also more interesting... The Pinkfong thing is yet another complication as the more precise one gets, the less easy to readily define it is as to whether it should count as a 'fictional artist'.

Novelty records were hardly a new thing though in truth; they'd been just as frequent (and often as popular) in the decades leading up to the 1990s, albeit in a different form musically. I think it was really more a case of the early '90s seeing an explosion in setting almost anything - however corny or naff - to a dance or rave beat and arrangement, an ironic idea which soon became very tired and tiresome in equal measure. Numerous old kids' TV progs, characters and more recently-popularised computer game themes and icons were increasingly plundered to produce often quite substantial chart hits, as the notion of a mass appeal 'pop' sound or widescale movement among the record-buying public ebbed away after the '80s ended, and conventional pop music became less dance-centric while a lot of dance became more pop-centric. And that wasn't always good news. It's somewhat staggering to recall now that a fairly hard-edged and more serious electronic punk outfit like The Prodigy had their maiden chart hit with a song that sampled a British government ad campaign aimed at alerting kids to safety issues - 'Charly'! They moved away from that kind of stuff pretty soon after, sensing that so-called 'sub-genres' of the ever-fragmenting dance scene, such as 'toytown techno' (read The Smart E's, Urban Hype et al) was hardly likely to last beyond a couple of years as an amusing distraction from the more controversial aspects of it, and to prove they had rather more about them than most typical faceless studio-based computer-led acts with whom they first rubbed shoulders in the charts. I guess all that was a fairly classic British reaction to something which was threatening to become a little too serious and divisive for the yoof - at least through the lens of most conservative press at the time - so in response, show the 'funny' side by messing about with daft kiddy samples and ringtone-like melodies and thereby take the sting out of rave for the average young listener. Sadly all it did was cheapen it yet-further, and wear it out quicker, yielding to various, still-sample-led, but rather more earnest and cool kinds of dancefloor fodder which tended to populate the fast-churning charts later in the decade. And those of us who remember it all first hand should be thankful - we only really were bothered by the tip of the iceberg; a look at the extended Top 200 Gallup-compiled charts of the era reveal just how many more truly dire records DIDN'T make the higher echelons, and from which most of us were largely spared! For every MC Parker hit, there were probably three or four non-hits of the same ilk.

As I recall they were always just credited as a collective, i.e. The Kids From 'Fame'. Saying that I think that on 'Hi-Fidelity' the lead singer Valerie Landsburg was formally credited, and was so using her own name rather than that of her character (which I forget now and can't be bothered looking up!). On that measure, no fictional individual character names were utilised for artist/chart credit purposes, and so I'd say they probably shouldn't count. They did appear 'in character' I suppose in associated music videos, but as - I think - the actors' own actual voices were used on the recordings of the hits, again I would struggle to align them with other more obvious fictional acts such as those which were only ever presented as characters in costume (e.g. The Wombles) or as cartoon characters (e.g. The Archies) and where the actual singers/musicians who played on the records were not the same as those appearing on TV or video to 'perform' them.

Interesting topic! I suppose anyone who's known me for any serious length of time realises I have a pretty thorough knowledge of pop music and especially the UK charts (or at least HAD - I confess it's weaker now than it was 25-40 years ago), and so it's all taken as part and parcel of my character really, and not thought of as especially odd anymore. Saying that, I don't feel the subject really comes up in regular routine sociable conversations with my current circles of friends that much, partly because my knowledge can get a bit too 'granular' for them to hold any interest in, and partly because a large number of my chums are my own age or older, sometimes by 10-30 years. So such folk generally don't have any awareness of, or interest in, more recent/current chart content, limiting any chat about it to earlier decades which perhaps they considered 'their era'. Anything before the 1980s I know about but not to the extent I do for after that time as I wasn't born until the mid-1970s, so even then it can fall through the cracks quite readily and it's just easier to avoid boring people with too much data/trivia they'd only find fascinating if they held similarly strong attachment to the charts as I do. And let's face it folks, most people don't, even less than might've been the case in the latter decades of the 20th century. In the '80s and '90s, when I was most into listening to and buying into the singles charts, I was undoubtedly dismissed by some as a 'chart geek', impressing, bewildering and irritating people in equal measures with the depth and breadth of my knowledge! Though with more contemporary people then still engaged with and interested in pop, that wasn't such a negative thing; as someone said earlier our sort of specialised knowledge can and has proved very successful with pop quizzes, and when one brings home a load of beer or money for one's mates to share thanks to one's geekery (happened a few times while at University), then one tends not to be too unpopular for long! As the '00s and '10s passed I found myself less and less interactive with what was classed as modern pop and what troubled the weekly charts, although a general handle on the way they work and the wider market remains. Sadly though a lot of that kind of stuff won't win me any prizes at pub quizzes etc and my awareness of who had a hit with what, what number it reached and when etc isn't now anywhere near as encyclopaedic as it once was, meaning I have effectively 'retired' from such participation. Actually, when's the last time I even saw a pure POP quiz being held? All seems to be so-called 'general knowledge' nowadays... Happily though I have found that in the last 20 years at least, UKMix, and to a lesser but still relevant extent BuzzJack, have provided all the necessary outlets I seem to require in order for me to really indulge those trivial and obsessive aspects of this now more niche topic online, in a way that I know will be shared, respected and even enjoyed. So I appreciate still being on board with you all!

It is true that record labels in the UK only really began to give up on the front-loaded, two-month build-ups for key single releases in order to sell as many copies as possible and chart as highly as they could in the second half of the '10s, when it was becoming ever-more evident that online streaming of music was rapidly cannibalising paid-for sales and that consumers were comfortably being hurried along to move away from purchasing and towards renting their songs. The attempt at 'on air, on sale' Ben mentions above in early '11 was commendable, especially to those consumers frequently frustrated by the apparently most protracted delays to anticipated releases occurring in the UK, often coming months after they'd dropped in other countries, but in hindsight it was just a few years too premature. One could say it was ahead of its time, but besides the concept simply reviving the status quo that had existed for four decades prior to the early '90s, it was only really the mass exodus away from buying over to streaming in a short number of years that rendered OA, OS more apt and long-term pre-release promos increasingly irrelevant.

Yeah of course Robbie, TOTP would've certainly been the sooner reveal for regular viewers than the Top 40 show, by some three days. And it inevitably set stores up for the next few days into the weekend for higher sales, primarily of whichever singles happened to feature on the show that Thursday, so it was very influential for those who actually bought most if not all their singles at that time. However, as a youngster with no real capital of my own so to speak, there was no way I could've persuaded my parents to go out and buy all the songs I liked from the charts - so recording off the Sunday show became the answer as usually the entire track would be played more-or-less (especially if a new entry or climber) and once we got FM stereo the quality of radio recordings really got good. This (and the occasional purchase of hits compilations) became my way of consuming chart singles for two decades! I only seldom had a single bought for me, or later went out and bought it myself - either due to the recording being poor or incomplete or if I really, REALLY liked the song. I tend to use the term 'Sunday to Saturday week' with the older charts as that was what it was latterly, but yes, until the mid-'90s Monday was indeed the first regular retail day, in alignment with the calendar week, unless of course that fell on a Bank Holiday etc which would mean a later start to the shops opening. So in effect we had a six-day chart survey week. This to my mind made Sunday an even more apt day for chart compilation and eventually its first broadcast, as it was the retail-free 'day off' in between the end of one sales survey period and the start of the next. Hence partly why I still find this split week Friday to Thursday frame rather counter-intuitive, almost regardless of the original reasons why it was enacted, which Graham has enlarged upon above. Given today's streaming and sales patterns, I really don't think it would've mattered if they'd retained the original chart week ending Saturday, but there we are. One thing I am in agreement with, despite all my soundings in favour of the old system, is that now, ten years in, we should neither seek nor expect things to change back to how they were. One major shift in survey frames every 50 years is enough and for the duration, for all its faults, we should now just sit back and stay consistent to the Friday chart.

Well of course, in a sense, in the UK, Tuesday did used to be the chart reveal day, even when the week ran more conventionally from Sunday to Saturday, during the period when the compilers of the chart weren't able to crunch all their data swiftly enough to have a complete new chart prepared for radio broadcast the first day after the close of the survey week, i.e. Sunday. It wasn't available for many years until Tuesday, which would be when the new chart would first be counted down, three days into the week in which it was current, leaving what we all heard on the more detailed, expanded two-hour Sunday show as a catch-up on the week that had just passed, rather than the one ahead. This didn't resolve until October 1987 when computer compilation was such that a reliable chart was finally able to be made available to Radio 1 by Sunday afternoon in time for their main chart show, rendering the old Tuesday lunchtime slot redundant. I still wonder how many youngsters pre-Oct '87 knew that the chart they were hearing and likely recording selected songs from on Sundays was in fact a week out of date?! Given I was only four when I began listening concertedly to it I'm sure I couldn't have known; it must only have been sometime after I started primary school a year later and heard some people talking about the Tuesday programme that I cottoned on (even then being a schoolchild I was hardly ever able to hear that show live - some might've bunked off in order to do that but I'd never get away with that as my mum was always home and there'd have been hell to pay - I was lucky to be allowed to purloin the hi-fi for two hours on a Sunday!). It does highlight that a Tuesday is a bit of a crap day for a chart reveal broadcast, especially among those still committed to a school regime, but of course nowadays anyone that bothered can just listen to it at their leisure anytime via catch-up services. So as I observed in my earlier post, the actual day of initial broadcast now matters far less, and to far fewer listeners, than it did in my day.

Personally, I could see some sense in, and indeed welcomed, the coordination of around-the-globe release dates, as it brought about more equality across markets, and didn't make consumers in one country (usually the UK!) wait an extended time for their new favourite single releases to be made available to buy or stream legally. Yes, it helped bring an eventual end to the era of big-selling first-week singles, initially on CD and latterly on download, but given true sales were starting to dwindle as they were rapidly being cannibalised by streaming anyway, this seemed less of an issue than it might've been a few years prior to the date they chose to give effect to this initiative. What I didn't particularly understand was the choice of a Friday instead of say Monday as the global release date. AcerBen rightly observes above that this was partly to do with getting ahead of any pre-new-week/over-weekend leakages, especially of albums, but otherwise this didn't really chime with me in a largely post-physical, post-shop, not far-off post-sales era. It is true that companies weren't required to adhere to the new day, and while a good number do, in fact a single could be released for streaming on any day of the week, as it suits the artists and label concerned. So the concept of needing to shift the survey frame for the official charts away from the traditional Sunday-to-Saturday week (which broadly coincides with the actual Monday-to-Sunday calendar week around which most of our lives revolve, and so made much more intuitive sense than a 'split' frame across two different calendar weeks) to a Friday-to-Thursday model, just so that most new releases would have a whole seven days' sales/streaming action before their first chart position (if one is attained) is calculated, never really made sense to me. I think the ten years that have elapsed since 5th July 2015 have shown that sticking with the Sun-Sat status quo really wouldn't have been a negative thing, in an era where tracks move up and down the chart more organically (albeit a lot more slowly as a rule thanks to streaming's impact), and maximising the chart position first week out no longer has any real relevance or currency. Some of the biggest hits we now see may well open at No 1 or a similarly lofty position, but equally they may arrive very low-down and take months to realise their peak - some songs being marketed for months before even breaking the Top 100, depending on circumstances. As a longstanding chart follower and someone who's slightly anally-retentive about trying to keep things as consistent as possible in order to retain as much like-for-like comparability between what's happening now and what occurred in the same context in past decades, I also favoured the long-term adoption of Sun-Sat as it not only roughly aligned with actual calendrical weeks, but also a clear direct reference between one year and another, across what was five-and-a-half decades of recorded popular music and charting its relative commercial fortunes, albeit through a number of different formats and modes of consumption, and via numerous developments in the music itself and its creation. The dates - whether one used the survey week, chart use week, week-commencing or week-ending - would correspond. Suddenly switching to Fri-Thu meddled with that in a way someone like myself instinctively wouldn't like! The chart 'week' is now split across two 'real' weeks. I believe that while global release day had merit, the movement of chart weeks in the UK and US (and presumably several other countries) in 2015 was unmerited and unnecessary. While I do see it's important that we accept/tolerate that change, especially over one decade on from it, and adjust our chart dating system to accord with it, there's a part of me that still quite likes the fact that the US charts nevertheless adhere to the Billboard Saturday issuance date when referring to their charts (albeit that it sits two days after the week in which that chart's use expired on the Thursday)! I believe our very own UKChartsPlus publication also did likewise, if only for continuity and because I think it was easier for KingofSkiffle's database management, although no longer being a subscriber I can't say for sure if that is still the case. Finally, I completely concur with those who say they preferred the Sunday chart show arrangement. It's not merely nostalgia; it is just an obvious time slot in a week to air a show like a Top 40 countdown. And that's regardless of the dual realities that far fewer people are concerned with the weekly charts than in previous generations, and that those who still are can now hear the broadcast at any time to suit their personal convenience online. I hear the 'First Look' show far more than the actual week-end Friday Top 40 simply because it's a casual listen for me nowadays, and chances are I'll be lounging at home Sun pm listening to the radio, but out 'n' about Fri afternoon. All this is of course very-much a case of 'it is what it is' now, but if we could turn the charty clock backwards I'd like to have seen them decide to stick to the old model rather than adopt the new, even if they still insisted on Fri as the preferred day of the week on which to set the new release day standard.

It's ironic that where this was once a reasonably commonplace occurrence in the 2000s/'10s, nowadays it's far more likely that we'd see things the other way around - i.e. songs not officially issued as 'singles' still get into the charts. By this I mean those that are either heavily promoted through inclusion on a TV or film soundtrack, but which were never formally issued as a single per se (and never will be), or those which are already available on a parent album release, and while might be promoted as a single via radio, TV and online channels, actually can't be streamed or bought from a stand-alone single package as such (i.e. they can only be streamed or bought as a track from the album bundle). These scenarios occur increasingly commonly, what with Netflix shows suddenly catapulting older (sometimes non-single) songs into contemporary popularity, and the release of an album after issue of maybe two or three prequel singles, which I suppose renders it technically unnecessary to put any tracks from it that are later promoted as 'singles' out in a stand-alone single thereafter. An alternative strategy may be to issue a remixed/rerecorded edition of the original album version as a stand-alone single, while the original only remains available from the album. The one that always stands out in my memory as becoming ineligible for the charts was a song called 'Industry' by a band called The Modern, a sort of latter-day imitation of The Human League in style and sound. Issued on CD in March 2006, it was set for a Top 15 entry on release, but was rendered excludable at the last minute, I think owing to the OCC having detected what appeared to be some irregular and suspicious sales through certain stores, enough to justify not awarding it an official chart position. Quite a lot of singles were barred from charting due to known or strongly-suspected hyping attempts, as far back as the 1970s.

In truth I avoided posting any votes for Mariah and Wham! just because I assumed they'd outperform most other options, based on how they seem to do just that on the official charts nowadays. Sadly I fear that 'Christmas Wrapping' continues to miss out on a UK Top 40 placing just because it didn't manage one first or second time around in the early '80s. Had it been a bigger hit originally, it might've stood a better chance of sticking with people through the ensuing decades and thus perform better in current-day seasonal streaming tallies than it has (I also would guess being a tad more leftfield it isn't included on every preconceived playlist that many people passively rely on to play out a background of Christmassy hits). That said, it does seem to get a decent amount of airplay each Christmas, and so it seems that more recent generations have yet to fully take notice of it as they have done some other seasonal fodder which was released many years before their time

Surely we could cover a lot of individual examples here by just saying that any track that was never released officially as a 'single' per se (or only was after specific keen demand became apparent for the song following use in a popular TV or film vehicle etc) that went on to become a notable commercial/chart success qualifies as something which wasn't necessarily intended to be a 'hit', at least in its own right (so besides being a contributory factor to a parent album's popularity). Since the advent of the download era in particular we've seen innumerable examples of album-only non-singles go on to attain often quite prominent chart profiles, as it became possible to cherry-pick any song from a digital bundle regardless of whether it was (or later would be) released as a stand-alone single, and particularly once digital sales of all tracks not just those marketed as physical singles were permitted to become fully-chart-eligible. Lots of album tracks charted for just a week or two after the release of a hotly-tipped or eagerly-awaited artist's latest long-player (obvious examples include Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift, Adele and Drake); sometimes every song on the album made its own impression (at least until chart rules were introduced to cap the number allowed to appear on the official published version of the Top 100 to just three). However, a few did sustain lengthy chart careers in tandem with the track that actually had been given the single release. I think Alan Jones used to refer to these as 'halo hits' in his MW commentaries. Some obviously were clear future singles-in-the-making, and were eventually given their release in that format, but only after they'd already racked up a pretty impressive chart presence and sales tally as just an album track (the most memorable example to my mind was Lady Gaga's 'Poker Face', which charted when the album was released but didn't receive a proper single issue for three months while its predecessor 'Just Dance' was still working through its peak chart career). There are many more however that were never intended to be singles, and indeed were never issued as such officially, even after a growing chart presence, making these simply album cuts (or possibly B-sides in a few cases) which just sold/streamed well in their own right presumably with no expectation on the part of either the artist or label that they would do. Perhaps this just goes to demonstrate how formal releasing as a single has become less and less relevant to determining which songs become chart hits, or whether or not a certain track might end up doing very well. Promotion of a song - be that by the record label through the traditional media of radio and television, more recently via direct artist promos through their website or social media platform, the unexpected random usage of that title to soundtrack a very popular film or TV series, and/or adoption en masse by ordinary folk as a backing track for self-produced viral videos (TikTok etc) - has always been a notable factor in helping to determine whether it will become a commercial success. It's never been a dead-cert guarantee - there's been many flops despite great promos and media interest - but, even in the physical-only era, having your song on a film soundtrack, on an ad, as well as airing on radio and later TV, could really boost its chances in the charts, and often led to reissues of older songs as singles and them being bigger hits than they'd ever been. In the digital world, with access to so much more music including all catalogue acts as well as currently-active artists' product, inevitably these aspects, alongside being able to catch on and go viral either through deliberate attempts or by genuine accident, adds hugely to a song's potential fortunes. A number of tracks which have graced the 2020s charts were never singles originally or expected to be hits in their own right, but years later being picked up for a long-running and mass-binged TV series for example really did propel these hitherto-little-known recordings into major chart hit territory. And still they never actually became available, or were specifically promoted as, singles. Off the top of my head, Djo's 'End Of Beginning' I think fits these criteria.